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Santi
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theaeuryphaessa.bsky.social
This thought-provoking passage from Iain McGilchrist, on the importance of our attention, is worth reading and re-reading. Much to chew on.
Attention is not just another 'cognitive function': it is . . . the disposition adopted by one's consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something—or don't attend to it—matters a very great deal. By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity—or art, sex, humour, or religion—to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms—all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see. By Iain McGilchrist from his book, 'The Matter with Things'.
December 2, 2024 at 3:18 PM